There were red faces all round at the Oxford Union last Saturday after an extremely low turnout for the Toga Party. Out of a planned attendance of 300, only 90 people bought tickets for the event organised by Secretary Ed Tomlinson. The Union was expecting a low turnout but still ended up catering for twice as many people as actually arrived. The event, billed as a ‘funnus maximus’ ‘maddus partius’, turned out to be very good value for money for those who did attend there was enough drink for every guest to receive at least one bottle of wine and unlimited alcopops. Ed Tomlinson, who is expected to run for Union President at the end of this term, said, “It was a very good event and an enjoyable time was had by all.” He suggested low attendance may be due to the number of balls over the last two weeks. Standing Committee formally thanked Tomlinson. However a member of the committee, speaking to Cherwell, warned “Using such slogans as ‘maddus partius’ are unlikely to appeal. The Union needs reconsider how it runs big events.” This event underscores the difficulty the Union faces in organising social events. Earlier this term, Union cancelled the ‘Dinner Love’.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

St John’s has plans to build a new quad when it resumes control of land on St. Giles. The site, though belonging to the college, has been leased out to the university for number of years now. But in 2005, St John’s is to repossess the land. The JCR is in favour of situating a new joint JCR-MCR common room there, with a new quad and facilities for both undergrads and post-grads. However, the St. John’s bursar stressed that nothing has been agreed upon. The college is keen to provide accommodation for all of its students, within its confines, according to the bursar, but the land will “probably be used for a variety of purposes.” Some of the other suggestions so far have been to use part of it for art studios and a gallery, or to create some soundproof music rooms where students can practice. Yet as the richest college and large landowner, some have raised questions about whether St John’s money might be better spent elsewhere. In the light of the Student Union’s recent inequality report, a St John’s student asked “Do we really need another quad? Why doesn’t the SCR use its money to help the University as a whole instead?”
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

Antonella Magnani, 28, recently sat her final law exam while in labour in a hospital delivery room, after college authorities concluded that giving birth was not a valid reason for missing the exam. In her final hours of labour, a team of eight examiners arrived to question her on exam topics such as marketing and public rights. She was reportedly “very calm”, even when the contractions started to become more regular – and gave birth to a daughter, Giulia, two hours after the examiners had left the room.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

A Chilean student is auctioning off her virginity to pay for her last two years on a Modern Languages course. The 21-year old, who wished to remain anonymous, said “I will provide a certificate signed by a doctor to prove that I am a virgin. No man has ever touched me.” The auction is being conducted by Radio CRC, and the bidding started yesterday at £350 – with the opening bid coming from a member of her college’s teaching staff. The college had no comment on this particular aspect of tutor-student relations.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

Angry York residents are lying in wait every night for unsuspecting student revellers, after the University’s Vice-Chancellor has offered a reward for information relating to “rowdy and drunken” student behaviour. Students who are successfully identified by the elderly vigilantes will face a fine of £100, with the possibility of community service and even potential expulsion from campus. The appeal for information sets out a list of “unacceptable student behaviour” including “shouting,” “dancing,” and “riding shopping trolleys at high speeds through residential areas at night.”
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

He walks into the council chamber of the town hall, dressed in a black leather jacket and jeans, and proffers his hand firmly when I introduce myself. This was the man who in 1987 beat incumbent Roy Jenkins, the late Chancellor of this Univeristy, in Glasgow Hillhead to enter the Commons for the first time. And he’s been a rebel there ever since. Galloway was recently suspended by the Labour government, pending an inquiry for alleged “behaviour that is prejudicial or grossly detrimental to the party.” He is now pursuing a libel suit against the Telegraph, which accused him of accepting money from Saddam Hussein. He calmly told me he believed the allegations against him by the Telegraph and the establishment were racist or connected to the fact that his wife is Palestinian. “Anyone who wants to smear anyone associated with the Middle East or Arabs will pick on two things – homosexuality and money – and 20 years ago the Telegraph tried that on me.” He paused before adding, “There is a lot of Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment in the West. Muslims are being accused of many things and anyone who stands with them is among the accused.” His composure turned into fiery oratory as he began his speech moments later. Part defence statement and part political rally, tinged with occasional humour about escaping hanging thanks to the EU, about continuing to speak his mind inside or outside Wormwood Scrubs, about intelligence dossiers Austin Powers would be embarrassed by. It wasn’t hard to see why “Gorgeous” George has retained his current support despite recent troubles. Galloway takes a tough stance against his accusers, warning any paper repeating “crude forgeries” that his lawyers would “severely punish those who publish those lies about me.” Galloway believes he is “fair game for the most brutish assaults because the stances that I make are intensely controversial. People can attack me in a vicious way at will, but I will not allow people to tell lies about me.” He slams those controlling the Telegraph – Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher – for pursuing their own agendas against him and attracting applause as he said “if you can measure someone by their enemies, well I’m particularly blessed.” He is confident of his case, as he tells reporters outside later, “I don’t require you to believe or not believe. The important point is that the High Court in London will adjudicate on this matter.” He challenges the enraptured audience, and his popularity isn’t restricted to those against the war, “This is the point I was trying to make to you earlier about freedom of speech. Are we really content to live in a country, where an elected politician or any citizen, should be threatened with going to prison for speaking their mind?” He further maintains that he did not call on British soldiers to refuse to obey orders as alleged by The Sun, rather he called on them to refuse to obey illegal orders, “which happens to be a legal requirement on all armies and on all governments in the world since Nuremberg.” Nevertheless, The Sun intends to prosecute him for treason. Galloway makes his stand against the occupation of Iraq. The “real criminals” were those who “took us to war on an entirely bogus false prospectus” to enrich George Bush. The real looters of Baghdad were “the men in pinstriped suits who would arrive and begin looting Iraq’s oil wealth and parcelling out the contracts for the reconstruction of a country they have only just finished deconstructing.” No-one is spared Galloway’s fury in his attack against neo-imperialism. George Bush is “a man with the mind of a child”. Jay Garner, “a redneck Texan”, is “an ignoramus in an American uniform”, telling Iraqis what to do. “This is rejected in the world”, Galloway states. The anti-war movement is not an isolated one, he reassures the audience. It is part of a global movement, the biggest of its kind. Britons have been “grievously compromised by Mr Blair’s decision to put us in the first ranks of the hated. We marched a lot of people to the top of the hill, we’re not going to march them down again until we’ve changed this country for good.” As for the future of the party that suspended him, it “has to be recaptured by its membership to its ideals, or a new party has to be born. Thatcher left Downing Street in tears, and I predict that Tony Blair will go the same way.” His strong words weren’t just for “the real criminals”. Mobbed by reporters as he left the town hall, he expresses his disapproval of protestors from the East Oxford anti-war movement disrupting Andrew Smith MP at a recent event. “I think demonstrating outside is fine, but everyone has their right to speak, just as I have the right to be heard.”
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

Schizophrenic weather changes, grass stains, undercooked beefburgers, and a mixed-bag of bands: last weekend, Wadham College managed to recreate the authentic summer festival feeling with Wadstock, the daddy of student band events. The diversity of the styles represented frequently left the inebriated audience befuddled by the sudden transition from accessible folk music to angsty cathartic metal. Openers, the Wadham Swing Band eased the early arrivals into the proceedings with an innocuous and chilled-out set, which didn’t quite prepare us for the distorted aural assault of Advert From TV. Initially insipid and lacklustre, the band warmed up to belt out a medley of The Hives-influenced rock sounds. Follow-up act Saturday Night Suicide peddled that generic indie-schmindie punk with which we’re all a bit too familiar. However, they managed to raise themselves above the banal with the occasional flamenco guitar moment, and a dash of Smashing Pumpkins-esque melodic rock.
The Alternotives, a cappella group fronted by two sweetvoiced darlings, got the audience going with well-known tracks like ‘Kiss The Rain’ and ‘Like A Prayer’. The group clearly have talent in spades, but the grubby faux-festival atmosphere did them no favours, the backing singers frequently slipping out of step with the lead vocalists. At Risk were a cut above the average rawk band, fluctuating between heavy distortion and melancholic introspection, with innovative electric violin moments thrown in for good measure. Even those who weren’t enamoured by the prospect of ‘rocking out’ in the rain could nonetheless appreciate the eye candy of a Brian Molko-alike guitarist, just one of the obscenely attractive band members. More visual treats were in store, the compère informed us drunkenly, in the shape of Rich Reason, vocalist, guitarist and purveyor of all manner of random instruments, in Vaughan. The compère needn’t have talked them up, for Vaughan were undoubtedly the most technically competent and refreshing act of the day, marrying eclectic jazz, funk, rock and folk sounds in a sonic onslaught that was consistently surprising and upbeat. The audience was also treated to trumpet-playing, a violin solo and swift hand manipulations on the decks, gaining a genuinely enthusiastic response.
So as the sun set over Wadham, now littered with plastic cups, and drunken students, the college could breathe a sigh of relief. Not merely the satisfaction of having pulled off a monster band event, but also the relief of having a whole year to recover before Wadstock 2004. Every student worth his Belle and Sebastian cds and designer denim will be waiting with bated breath.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on. Well, there’s something to try out next time you’re in Filth. Yum. These are words spoken by Eric Packer, the central figure in Don DeLillo’s new novel, Cosmopolis (Picador, £16.99), to one of his many women. The moral throughout the book is the corrupting power of capital: DeLillo creates a Capitalist nightmare/ dream in which he places a man utterly devoid of human sensation. His only forays into feeling consist of bestial urges, eating and screwing. And abusing drink receptacles too, apparently. Ultimately, the super-rich, superbright twenty-something dot com entrepreneur discovers that his only hope of escape from a dampened existence is in his own destruction at the hands of a rambling former-employee. DeLillo has been internationally lauded and won many awards for critically acclaimed best-sellers like Americana and more lately, Underworld. I haven’t read either. If I were to judge this author by this book, I wouldn’t bother. It’s never nice admitting publicly that you aren’t impressed by a book, especially one that seems to promise so much. Reading it, you can’t help but feel that it’s a bit of a cop-out – the half-fulfilment of an idea that could be fascinating, were it not something we are already aware of and familiar with. His prose is blunt with its own poetic concision, but is never quite as punchy as he might have hoped. There are brilliantly executed moments in the novel. For example, some of the most interesting passages in the book are those that depict Packer’s thoughts as he lies awake before starting his day. The theme of order against disorder, patterns in chaotic economy, is also effective and cleverly wrought, as is Packer’s unsettling indifference to almost everything around him. Overall, though, it’s somewhat disappointing. It’s not that this book lacks style or interest – DeLillo’s images of a bleak, looming city are effective, as is the fragmented, passionless progress of Packer’s day, giving form to the notion of the loss of human sentiment. Once you grasp the direction in which the novel’s headed, though, nothing spectacular happens; maybe DeLillo intended this, but it doesn’t bring anything to the narrative itself.The flaw of this book is that it reveals nothing particularly new. We have now all heard of Anti- Capitalist movements, and their arguments; we have all witnessed immense political and corporate ambition. Cosmopolis, then, presents a strong dystopian vision, and one that is, in itself, not impossible to foresee. Read it, by all means, and enjoy its many strengths but don’t hope for much more than a depiction of how a modern yuppy realises the vapidity of his existence.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

Help me. I’m standing in front of five hundred or so people, on stage with a guy who looks like Errol Brown. I was called up here with another Caucasian, two Hispanics, two Japanese people (one of whom is bonkers), two black people, and another Caucasian, this one an uninvited teacher from Baltimore. I’ve somehow been roped into an ethnically-based dancing competition, where I will defend my race’s dancing ability in front of, seemingly, the whole of Harlem. Since my dancing is usually described as grotesque’, I’m not feeling that confident. Welcome to the World Famous Apollo Theater (I realised a few days later that I had heard of it, in the song ‘Walk on the Wild Side’), whose Wednesday Amateur Nights, like this one, have helped to launch the careers of some of America’s most prestigious black performers: Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown and Michael Jackson, being a few. The set-up is aggressive and confrontational: for each member of the audience, absolute commitment to each act is necessary as basically every performer is subject to a constant wave of either cheers or jeers, sometimes changing if they miss a note. They do this often, because they can’t hear over the cheers. It strikes me that if the audience shut up, they’ll get a better show. The dancing competition is the first twenty minutes of this drawnout and reasonably embarrassing show. People of different races are invited from the audience onto the stage to dance for thirty seconds; one imagines that this is intended to disprove racist stereotypes about dancing ability, however, in my case, it merely served to firm up the assumption that white people can’t dance. Remarkably, from the very start of a show which is ostensibly whole-heartedly multi-cultural, celebrating the very foundations of the rainbow nation of America, I start to feel marginalised. Of course, I suppress this awkward inclination. I am aware that the history of representing black voices in theatre is a chequered and nasty one: the tradition of minstrelsy which dominated the American popular theatre for about seventy years was about entrenching stereotypes of black Americans: the wise old Uncle Remus, the strong, matriarchal Mammy, the loveable buffoon. The most distressing part of this construction of black identity is the way it has pervaded black culture itself, as a still-racist Hollywood has an unpleasant ‘black themed’ Oscar ceremony, compéred by matriarchal neo-Mammy Whoopi Goldberg and celebrating derivatives of whitedefined stereotypes in “Monster’s Ball”, or the cultural predominance of images like The Fresh Prince of Bel- Air, a show run-through with colonial imagery. One cannot accuse the Apollo’s Amateur Night of the same tendency. Granted, the compere has a few crap ‘black people are different to white people’ jokes, but there are no post-minstrel images. Daisy Donovan turns up, in a surreal twist, and is booed off-stage almost immediately: partly because she was rubbish, partly, I suspect, because her choice to sing ‘Simply the Best’ was met with suspicions of racism. There are two questions which this theatre asks: first, is this aggressive or antiwhite? And secondly, what, if anything, can white theatre learn from such a vibrant event? This piece of theatre, like other plays I saw in America, had less selfawareness than one might expect from a diffident Oxford student’s effort. There was nothing suspect about a singer telling an audience, mid-song, that he chose God over land, over money and over his own name, and then inviting the audience to chant “Jesus”, which they refused to do, while simultaneously celebrating the fact that this demand was being made of them. I felt implicated more as a Brit than as a white person, becoming awfully worried that maybe there was something undignified about this level of commitment to the theatrical moment. This, of course, was something which shocked me about myself: surely we should encourage this engagement. Antonin Artaud and Konstantin Stanislavsky would certainly support this, since one of the most important points of overlap between their theories is the sweatiness and guts to be involved in any theatrical production. Here is absolute commitment, absolute physical exertion in the theatre. Brecht would be excited by the importance of participation in this theatre, and Augusto Boal certainly would. Both being theorists who demand that their audiences exercise their own personal agency, be it intellectual, political or, in some of Boal’s work, physical. Amid the cheers of hundreds of people in either voracious support or disgusted condemnation of any fool who decided to give a half-baked and over-long version of ‘Unbreak My Heart’ by Toni Braxton, the first question in “why do I care what you think about this performer?” As a fellow performer, my first instinct is to cheer all the louder when someone is doing badly. Again, I was missing the point. don’t care what a busload of schoolkids from Delaware think of the god-botherer, but more importantly, I don’t really care about the godbotherer either. The audience forced into an often brutal and necessarily empowered critique of the performance and, even better, constantly forced to act on the basis of it. This, I finally concluded, was the point, and I was glad to have felt a little uncomfortable. The energy is not racial in character at all; it is the fundamental of an exciting and relevant theatre. Our ‘national’ theatres in Britain do nothing compared to the Apollo towards achieving this vitality, which restores one’s faith in the threat of live action, the violence of true theatre. The entertainment on offer is often banal, but the effect legendarily powerful; the audience leave the theatre running into Harlem, shrouded in senses of occasion, personal potency and ritual. Who could say that about Merry Wives of Windsor at the RSC?
ARCHIVE: 4th Week TT 2003

I’m on a bike, up a mountain, in Bolivia, and I’m remembering that bit in The Beach, the part where Richard talks about the futility of Travel. Travel deserves a capital ‘T’ because it’s not achieved by just going on a poncy holiday somewhere. You don’t Travel just by grabbing a backpack and this year’s edition of Lonely Planet. Travel is a state of mind, it’s about doing something different. Only it’s hard to actually succeed in being different when no matter how far away you get, someone with the same guidebook as you has got there first. So you keep trying, thinking that that elusive, profound, and above all unique experience of Travel is just past the next llama. Bolivia is a good place to visit if you want to experience “the world’s most” of pretty much anything. For example, the road starts just north of La Paz, the world’s highest capital city. Carved into sheer mountainside, it was built by prisoners taken during Bolivia’s war with Paraguay in the 1940s. To get the image of this stretch into your head, imagine a road slightly narrower than Turl Street. Imagine this ‘highway’ stretching for miles, almost always downhill at a sharp decline, with a vertical drop permanently to one side. Imagine that the road goes unpaved in many places, with numerous potholes, and every corner a hair-pin bend. Now imagine that two lanes of traffic run all times, including articulated lorries and large passenger buses, with no attempts to control the traffic save the occasional locals who wave vehicles around corners seemingly at random. Other than that, drivers avoid certain death only by beeping their horns when coming at a turn at high speed. Often two trucks end up facing each other, both perched on a corner, resulting in a battle of wills to ascertain who will compromise his manliness and reverse, very, very slowly. The sides of the road are dotted with memorials to the dead; the highest death toll yet one crash is eighty. Unsurprisingly it has taken on a kind of notoriety among Bolivians. Then, one day, some enterprising young travel agent realised that here was a golden opportunity: buy some mountain bikes, hire couple of guides, and market this jaunt as an unmissable adventure experience. This is how it came to pass that this road now daily sees collection of die-hard cyclist nuts from across the world zoom down it at break-neck speed, hugging the edges and feeling their masculinity assert itself at every turn. This is also how, bizarrely, dangerously, and almost certainly suicidally, I ended up on it as well. The irony is that you don’t actually have to hurl yourself down 4000m of badly paved highway to come home with decent stories from Bolivia. Wandering through La Paz, nearly five hundred years after colonisation, one can never be sure to what extent Spanish culture has ever taken hold. Shopkeepers burn llama foetuses in their doorways to ward off evil spirits, while many women still wear their traditional dress of long flowing skirts and bowler hats. Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire, is still widely spoken. Travel in the countryside reveals many who have no knowledge of Spanish at all. West of La Paz lies Lake Titicaca, which is where, according to the Inca legend, the sun was born. It used to be the case that any traveller on the lake who was swept overboard could not be rescued: he or she would be left as sacrifice to the gods. Luckily, we were never forced to discover whether this rule still applies. To the north of the capital lies the Bolivian section of the Amazon jungle, where tourists can take jungle safaris, living river-side for days, and seeing alligators, anaconda snakes, and curious pink fresh-water dolphins. Those seeking a unique experience can travel to the south, where a guide will drive you on a three day journey across wilderness-like terrain and into Chile. The trip takes you past volcanoes, steaming geysers, hot springs, and over the enormous Salar de Uyuni, a salt-lake of perfectly flat whiteness stretching in every direction to the horizon. For sheer terror, however, there is little to compare to that road just outside of La Paz. In the end, my bicycle juant proved every bit as scary and painful as I thought. A 60-year-old French woman overtook me half way. I rode consistently in the rear and slowly. The American drugs checkpoint was a particular highpoint: they have installed a post to search all traffic for the raw ingredients of cocaine. Nevertheless, I would recommend the Bike Ride Of Death to any would-be Traveller to the region. It may not make you into a man, it might not be as original as you hoped, and it certainly won’t make women fall at your feet (except when they collapse in boredom at your latest story about llamas), but it will be different to anything you’ve done before. Especially if you’re scared of heights.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003